


i see the wires pulling while you're breathing

by swimthewholeriogrande



Category: Newsies (1992), Newsies - All Media Types, Newsies!: the Musical - Fierstein/Menken
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Steampunk, Fluff, Fluff and Angst, Friendship/Love, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Kidnapping, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Medical Procedures, Medical Torture, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Robotics, please read my dystopia rambles, this sounds weird as fuck but stay with me
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-12-19
Updated: 2018-12-19
Packaged: 2019-09-15 04:56:55
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 5
Words: 2,117
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16926915
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/swimthewholeriogrande/pseuds/swimthewholeriogrande
Summary: In a cold and changing world, there's no room for error - and no concessions for kids.





	1. Chapter 1

_Beep. Beep. Beep_

His head was aching with the drone. He swung his bare feet off the trolley as a finger traced down his spine; he stared at the wall in front of him and saw nothing.

There was a sudden click and a hiss of machinery. The needle went smoothly between his vertebrae and he heard the scrape of it on his bone; he bit his lip until blood ran down his chin in an effort to stay still and tried not to cry as it pulled inside things outside.

As they swabbed the injection site and tied the gown shut again, he kept looking at the wall; he didn't want to see -

"Gorgeous." The voice made his head jerk up involuntarily; the doctor was holding the vial, full of silver, the liquid thick and shining dully like stagnant water. His smile was wolfish.

Jack watched his blood glint grey and metallic in the light, and turned his face away. _Enough_.


	2. Chapter 2

It didn't always use to be like this.

Crutchie knew his name didn't appear out of nowhere; he could remember the pain and wrench of his leg, his real leg, his flesh-and-bone leg, before - well, he had no need for a crutch now. His new leg whirred with every step; the metal smudged with fingerprints and fogged over like glass in wintertime. He could hear the machinery clicking and humming and the cogs spinning and grinding all day. It was going to drive him mad.

He didn't ask for it. He woke up with it, seamless to his hip, every nerve screaming in protest. There was still pain, phantom though it may be. They couldn't take that; it was the one thing they couldn't take away. Of course, he hadn't asked to come here either, but it wasn't like anyone did.

The Refuge wasn't so bad, anyway, not for him, not after living in the junkyards for so long and so alone. When the nurse had approached him, he'd agreed to a vaccine against the diseases the rats carried, and then they didn't let him go. It kind of sucked, being little more than a science experiment for new treatments for the people who could afford them, but it usually didn't hurt so bad. At least he had food and a roof over his head.

Others had it worse here. He knew that. Jack - at least he'd heard that was his name - now that was someone in hell. He'd heard the nurses murmur that Jack was barely human at this point, that he'd been torn apart and modified at an insane rate. Crutchie never got to see him much - but you could hear him, sometimes, if the experiments got too painful, and Jack would scream "Santa Fe! Santa Fe!" That was all Crutchie had ever heard him say. He was pretty sure Santa Fe used to be a town at west a few years, but it was a steamplant now - spewing gas to power the world. He guessed that was where Jack had come from - where he'd been stolen from, when he was still a person.

Because they'd all been stolen, even him, and maybe all this rationalising and it-could-be-worse-ing was just to stave off that creeping sense of claustrophobia; when his leg whirred and the door of his room was always locked and there was nothing in his room but a bed and a toilet, and he was a rat, he was a lab rat and one day they were going to get sick of just taking bloods and tinkering with his leg, and they'd mess with his head or his heart and he'd never see light again, never, never -

But it wasn't so bad. It _wasn't_.

-

"No! No!"

Jack could hear a new kid being brought in from two corridors away from the sheer volume of the screams. He screwed up his eyes and tried to ignore it as the scalpel hissed in the antiseptic, ready to tear into him. Doctors moved around the trolley in a silent dance. Wolves.

"I'm tired," he tried, voice rough like it always was, "I ain't up for this -"

"Amn't." Latex-gloved hands pressed on his stomach, marking the incision site. "It's amn't."

Jack threw his head back with a short, angry sigh, and the cuffs pulled on his wrists. "Look, just, gimme a day, I -"

"All ready?" He got cut off, like usual, and then when there was a nod of assent all around he felt the cold tip of the metal on his skin.

His muscles tightened involuntarily. "I'm not ready," Jack murmured faintly, and then, later, howling, "Santa Fe!" and it was another day and another cut and another new piece in his body.

Electricity hummed under his skin as a constant, their power an inch from his surface, uncontrollable programming and implants of God-defying purpose. It was never done. Jack was never, ever done.


	3. Chapter 3

"Oh, God, what did you do? What did you do? It hurts, it _hurts_ -!"

The new kid hadn't shut up since they finished working on him and stuck him in the room next to Crutchie's; he could hear the caterwauling through the vent blowing cold sterile air around the space. He was patient to a point, and then he knocked firmly on the wall.

"Kid," he raised his voice, and winced from lack of use, "they ain't listening, all right? What's wrong?"

The cries cut off. There was a low groan. "I woke up, and my eyes," the boy's breathing hitched, "they did something to my eyes and I can't see - it hurts." Another moan. "I was just getting vaccinated."

"Yeah, so was I." Crutchie tried to keep the bitterness out of his voice; it wasn't this boy's fault. "What's your name?"

"Davey." He sounded calmer now.

"M'Crutchie. You're gonna be alright, okay?" He shifted uncomfortably at the white lie; his mechanical knee followed a beat after his mental instruction, foreign and clunky. "Welcome to the Refuge."

-

He couldn't see, he couldn't see - 

It was so dark -

He was going to die here -

Davey was no coward; never had been; couldn't afford it. But when he woke up after the 'vaccination' that had knocked him out cold, and had opened his eyes and seen nothing and felt a burning itch, yeah, he lost it. Who wouldn't? He'd screamed and screamed until that velvety voice though the wall soothed him.

Maybe the voice was a hallucination. Maybe this was. Maybe he'd wake up and see Les curled next to him, steam rising through the dirty window, the rickety stove grumbling and wheezing. But it wasn't - he was here. In the Refuge. He'd heard of the Refuge, old ghost stories about the facility kids got snatched up and stolen to. Like the boogeyman. They became science experiments, test-tube kids, weapons or lab rats or bodies buried in unmarked graves. No one ever came out. And he'd followed that nice lady for a vaccine like an idiot, because he couldn't afford to be sick, he had to work - and now -

Davey clawed at his eyes, drawing thin red ribbons down his face. They stung and roared with pain. _I can't see._

_I can't breathe_.


	4. Chapter 4

"Don't touch me!" 

Jack was done. He was finished, he was exhausted, the stitches on his lower back were pricking and stinging and someone was coming at him with a razor trying to shave his head - his hair, the only thing they'd let him keep, and now they wanted a go at his brain.

"I'm fuckin' serious." He was backed into a corner, hands up defensively, one nurse already with a black eye. "No. I'll do somethin' else but I won't let you -"

His usually calm doctor's eyes were burning; Jack complained often but rarely fought this physically and it was clearly nagging at him. "Boy," he warned, "you have about five seconds until I throw you in isolation for the night." 

Jack's brain screamed at the threat of that horrible white room, but he scrunched himself further into the corner and snarled. 'I said no, I mean it," he maintained, and then -

Jack actually thought they killed him for a moment; when he opened his eyes all he could see was white. Then he blinked, turned his head, and realised firstly that he was in a new room, secondly that he was strapped to the bed, and thirdly that there were voices. 

They didn't sound like nurses - it sounded like two boys. One of them was jabbering, frantic, about eyes and pain and little brothers, and the other one was soothing and low. Jack lay still, dizzy, his eyes sliding shut again, and tried to form his voice into words. 

When they came, minutes later, they were rasping. "Hey," he called hesitantly, "who's that?"

The voices stuttered to an echoing halt. Jack knew they must be afraid, just like he was afraid, all his goddamn life.

"Crutchie." It was the soother's voice. "And he's Davey. Who's that?"

"M'Jack."

There was a low, muffled curse. "Jack Kelly?" Crutchie sounded more than a little wary. "You the kid they been messing with for years?"

Jack felt a dull ache in his stomach at this preceding reputation. Of course Crutchie was apprehensive - Jack couldn't blame him, being strapped to the bed like some kind of animal. All he knew was his name and a dead city; he was a process and that was all, so what wasn't there to be afraid of? "That's me." he replied tiredly. 

The other boy Davey cut in suddenly, his voice angry and wavering. "I don't understand - what happens here?"

"Massages." Jack snapped. He should be nice to the new kid, but it was hard when he barely remembered being new himself; it felt like his whole life had been lived on the edge of his scalpel, at least what he could remember. He shut his eyes and shut the other two boys out. Let them talk about fears and specifics all night, but Jack had nothing more to say.

-

"Are they interacting?"

"Minimally. 363CD ignored the others after a while. Doctor, are you sure about merging the projects? We never even intended them to speak -"

"Science is born out of accidents, and that vent system is a big one. We might as well take advantage of it. I want them in the same dorm by tomorrow."

"Understood."


	5. Chapter 5

_FIVE YEARS PREVIOUS_

_"What can you see?"_

_He felt pulling, twitching, cold numbness. He was sedated, sure, but there was a distant ache as they fiddled around with his - with his brain._

_"What can you see?"_

_Silvery-red blood soaked into the sterile sheet. Jack saw shapes and faces and something that hadn't happened yet, some elusive flash, before it was gone and he let out a dry, frustrated sob. "I can't." he whined, "I can't do it."_

_They pressed harder, until pain started to break through the drugged haze and Jack keened. It passed in front of his eyes again, the future or some dream, and he spat out words. "There's a skyscraper - I can't find it!"_

_The hand that pressed over his forehead was almost soothing, and at thirteen he was starving for any kind of affection. "Very good." the docter whispered. "Very, very good."_

-

Davey's vision was only just starting to come back when the doctor arrived, so all he saw was a blurry figure coming towards him and tensed involuntarily. Gloved hands pulled his eye wide open as he sat, docile with fear, and the man peered in like he was looking for Davey's brain.

He was shocked back into himself by the invasive movement and knocked the hands away. "Who are you?" he snapped, the full force of a Jacobs' fury. "You have no right to - what did you do to my eyes?"

The doctor seemed unbothered. "Enhanced them." he muttered, grabbing Davey's chin and holding fast this time. "How do they feel?"

"I can't see properly!" Davey jerked back again. His heart was pounding in his ears. "They're not enhanced, they're ruined."

"Cloudiness," the doctor called over his shoulder to a nurse, "glazed corneas, impaired vision. Run it again. Tell Burner to get it right this time."

"Don't do anything else." Davey's voice took on a pleading quality that he despised. "Don't do this, let me g-"

The needle hit the artery in his neck, sliding home with a stinging pain that made his eyes roll. Davey felt his hands weaken immediately, sliding like wet cement over the doctor's pristine coat; his skin looked greyish against the blinding white. "No," he mumbled, "don't..."

There wasn't a soul in the room listening - and if they had been, Davey didn't think they would have care.


End file.
